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Anzacs' snaps capture horror and humour of life in trenches

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Brendan Nicholson
April 8, 2008
WHEN three young Australian soldiers embarked for Gallipoli — a place they'd never heard of — they took a camera with them and an elegant album to fill with their snaps.
George Downes, Arthur James Cook and Henry James Lowe were railway workers chosen from the government railways to form the First Railway Supply Detachment, 11th Australian Army Service Corps.
Cook and Downes were 22 and Lowe was 21.
They all survived six bloody months on Gallipoli and instead of a book of holiday pictures, they assembled a startling record of daily life from the common soldier's point of view.
Their images show the tragedy of Gallipoli, with the temporary cemeteries decked with stark crosses, and the humour that survived there with a soldier raising a cut-out figure of the German Kaiser wearing a "pumpernickel" helmet in the hope that the Turkish snipers would shoot holes in it.
Then there are soldiers walking on the often-shelled stretch of sand they'd dubbed "Brighton Beach".
The photographs include images of life in the trenches, British commander Lord Kitchener and his generals visiting just before the skilfully executed withdrawal of the Anzacs and their allies from the peninsula, captured Turkish soldiers at Lone Pine, dug-outs, Anzac graves, hospital tents and supply depots.
Now the photographs taken by the three young diggers in 1915 have been chosen for exhibition by the National Archives of Australia for its April Find of the Month.
The young men, who went on to serve in France and the Middle East, survived the war and clearly understood the significance of their collection of 41 pictures.
In 1919 they registered them with the copyright authorities and titled their project "With the Camera at Anzac".
They carefully tagged their pictures with captions such as "Dug-out life Anzac gully", "Hell-Spit cemetery — Anzac", "Unloading mules — Anzac beach", "After a snowstorm, November 1915" and "Turkish prisoners taken at Lone Pine, August 1915".
Then there are shots of "Shrapnel Gully" and soldiers in their dug-out making bombs from jam tins.
National Archives researcher Jane Ellis said the photographs showed Gallipoli from the perspective of the soldiers.
"I find it really moving that we are glimpsing what life was like at Gallipoli through the eye of these young men," Ms Ellis said yesterday.
'It really provides a human touch to an historical event, this story of three young railway employees, two clerks and a porter, who joined up and went to war.
"To me it makes the Anzac story come alive. You feel as if you're there with them."
Ms Masters said the pictures were particularly important because the young photographers had carefully captioned them and created their own collection.
The pictures can be seen here on the National Archives Website.